Last summer, Erika Moretti ’15 was on a lobster boat on Great Bay helping a UNH researcher pull lobster traps for an annual survey when they found a blue crab in one of the pots. Green crabs are often mixed in with the catch; blue crabs are not. They don’t like cold water.

What’s going on inside your rose stems might surprise you.
Open one up and you might find an insect, or two or three, in various stages of growth, nestled within the walls. The entire lifecycle of the small carpenter bee, for example, occurs inside the dead stems of roses and other woody plants such as sumac and raspberries.

They found it at the edge of a Maine forest near a cornfield off a path called Potato Road. A distinctive orange hull, intact. Before it fell to the ground, it traveled along the jet stream for about 100 miles, taking photos and video and gathering atmospheric data.

Imagine a class full of students arrayed around a white pine tree in a 30-meter square, staring up through toilet paper tubes at the foliage. Now imagine a satellite 500 miles above the earth taking photos of that same tree, in an effort to measure the density and health of the forest canopy. And imagine researchers at UNH matching the students' data to the satellite images, square to pixel.

Spring is the season of horseshoe crab love, when thousands of females come up on beaches at high tide to spawn, and the smaller males hitch a ride on their backs or scuttle behind them to fertilize their eggs.

Photo credit: Larry Landolfi
The man in the black Cadillac showed up late in the summer of 1973. Plenty of people had seen him, driving back and forth along Bay Road, the ribbon of pavement that winds around the edge of New Hampshire's Great Bay between Durham and Newmarket.

On an August morning shimmering with late-summer heat, Fred Short, research professor of natural resources and marine science, leans over the gunwales of his skiff, strands of emerald eelgrass draped across his open palm. "Here, look at this," he says. "The blades are too thin." He runs his long-handled hook through the water, stirring up a swirl of sediment.

Visitors to downtown Durham this spring might have noticed students sporting an unusual accessory: a sticker with a yellow droplet on it proclaiming "I donated my nitrogen."No personal sacrifice was involved in the donation; rather, students did something they likely needed to do, badly. They patronized a custom-built Porta-Potty dubbed the Peebus.

Floyd Jackson, UNH's first marine scientist and an early champion of Great Bay

Floyd Jackson could do just about anything. Skin a mouse with surgical precision, make wine, explore the northern wilderness by dog sled, change lives. He started by remaking his own: having come to UNH from the Midwest as a landlocked specialist on "plant lice," or aphids, he became an expert on marine life, geology, and zoology—an ecologist even before the word had been invented.